SAP’s latest business suite comes to Malaysia

By Cat Yong

SAP Malaysia has announced SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), a set of business software that is fully built on their advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA. 

According to SAP Malaysia’s MD, Bernard Chiang, a global 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found that 80 per cent of CEOs say the biggest stumbling block for them is complexity. This complexity makes it difficult for their businesses to respond quickly to market changes and react accordingly.

Chiang also said a solution like SAP S/4HANA however, would empower business users to build applications and be more innovative about business processes.

He described, “It is intuitive and allows business processes to be conceived in real-time and implemented faster. This leads to more savings and a competitive edge.”

The new SAP S/4HANA is a successor to SAP R3, which was introduced in 1992. This latest version of SAP’s flagship enterprise software had undergone extensive rewriting of the code base, so as to offer greatly simplified and automated processes.

For example, other SAP solutions like the SAP Simple Finance solution leverages this new code base to dramatically reduce the number of processes and batch processing jobs. A retail customer in Indonesia, PT Delami, expects to reduce the monthly finance cycle from 25 days to 5 days, as a result.

SAP S/4HANA will be expanding the SAP portfolio of cloud solutions, such as those from SAP companies Ariba, Fieldglass and SuccessFactors. A managed cloud version would also be shipping later in 2015.

Chiang commented that there is strong momentum for the SAP’s in-memory HANA platform in Malaysia, with strong interest in the S/4 HANA business software suite too. 

The launch event in Malaysia, was officiated by His Excellency Ambassador Holger Michael, Germany’s Ambassador to Malaysia.